ID: 14
Username: [Redacted]
Title: The Hanging Tree
Note: There is a plain text version at the bottom

Dear Friend.

It has been a surprisingly long time since I last wrote you a letter, and I only have myself to blame. Perhaps, a good bit of the blame also falls on you. Yes, it definitely does. After all, its your enduring mystery that made me chase empty leads across the civilized world, as unstable as it is right now.

So much has changed since you disappeared, even if it has scarcely been a decade. The world is unrecognizable these days, and even a researcher such as myself is subject to so much scrutiny. Even while coming back to my own home. I still got the muttered glances and whispered comments, but I suppose that is the bed I made.

All that aside, what had driven me to Kalos was finding this old newspaper article of an entity known as the “White Ghost” resurfacing, after nearly a century of dormancy. This creature, out of time and incomprehensible by modern science seemed rather familiar, does it not? Agatha must never know, but I do fear that her decidedly hogwash claims of Time Travel just might be true. However that is not an hypothesis that one can accept...or rather, I can’t accept, that easily.

If you, my dear friend, were a soul tempest tossed upon the waves of time, then it only follows that you weren’t the only one. Nature operates within constraints of rules, and even the exceptions are well within the expected limits.

As you can imagine, Kalos wasn’t where I found my answers, but it was an interesting and productive time regardless. I hope you will indulge me as I write down my findings and conjectures, before I lose track of the details. It wasn’t particularly safe to write all this down in Lumiose itself, and now its been weeks. Perhaps I should look into a more secure alternative to a journal. Hmm. Thoughts for later.

Kalosian Tabloids are not usually my preferred reading fare, but I got into the habit of subscribing to a lot of newspapers, to keep abreast of all the goings on during the war, and Alakazam found this one particularly interesting. Admittedly more for the Rockets, an ever present scourge of Viridian. Frustratingly, the article was fragmented and missing most of its contents, so what could I do but head to the source?

As it turns out, despite the modern, enlightened facade that Kalos likes to present itself with, it has a long and storied history of mysticism, folklore and legends. The ancient Kalosians...or rather, Clovians as they once were called, were quite devout in their worship of the Natural Order as a living breathing entity. Which meant an equal devotion to life, as for to death.

“In the wings of death, life finds repose.” as attributed to the philosopher Ohmtaire, is an accurate representation of their beliefs. To that end, there was no greater example of it in action, than the barbaric custom of the Hanging Tree.

The oldest reference I found, was of the disparate tribes of Ancient Clovia who celebrated the “Reapen Festival”, where prisoners of war and the infirm and the sickly were sacrificed by being hung on a large tree till death, and then their entrails were festooned on the trunk like a macabre garland. Quite a grisly image, that. This sacrifice was done as a tribute to pay for rains and a good harvest. As times passed and technology grew, many of the tribes settled into large villages and towns, banding together against hostile pokemon, and this tradition was reduced to a symbolic offering of garlands made from willingly donated “sacrifices” of Roserade or Ivysaur flowers. As you might have made the connection already, this indeed was the start of the Mayqueen Festival as we know it today.

However, in the particularly isolated and harsh lands of what is now Laverre City, these traditions continued unabated, becoming gnarlier with time.

“Ever were Laverran Bows strung with Lumious guts.” a poet historian said in the ‘Chronicles of the Pledge Dynasty’, about these customs. Many terrible death cults naturally spawned from such a fertile atmosphere, and one in particular enthusiastically took to emulating the Wings of Death that they worshipped. Around what they believed to be the World Tree; some suppose, the same ancient tree that blooms in the heart of Laverre, they would arrange corpses of their victims in a signature “Y” pattern, their missing limb hung from the branches of the tree as an offering and a symbol of their dedication.

This is where some accounts disagree. For as old as Laverre’s central tree is, its provenance lies in between 1200 to 1500 years. However, ‘The Hanging Tree’ has been a recurring motif for much much longer in Clovian traditions.

As Pierre de Chaucon-Abelard put it, “Here stands the White Tree, flowering red, fed on blood and life.” in his writing 2200 years ago. He further goes on to describe the ritual murder of a “wyrdchilde” every year, alongside a creature I can only surmise was an Espurr, to the tree. While I hesitate to draw firm conclusions, but all seems to suggest that the Wyrdchilde simply were nascent psychics, a phenomena scarcely understood now, and feared then.

Little wonder then, that the accounts from Laverre often described hostile incursions by wild pokemon, and strange phenomena and a “thinning” of reality. Perhaps due to the constant wearing down of natural psychic barriers from their sacrifices. As we have come to see… in Lavender… or in the other thinned parts of the world, where grief, atrocities and horrors accumulated to such an extent, that even sense and empathy wore away, peeling back the frayed curtains of what is real and what is not. A trifle melodramatic of me, I suppose, and its certainly a whim of fancy that I wouldn’t have thought of normally, but being around disappearing boys from the future and living ghosts does tend to skew one’s viewpoints.

Its no matter, sanity is overrated after all.

Before compiling it all here, I did manage to glean Agatha’s thoughts on this. She wasn’t still too keen to see me, but I suppose natural curiosity overrode her palpable disappointment in me. In her opinion, the long decades, if not centuries, of deliberate murder of psychics could have created the potential for birthing a particularly potent being of distortion. What does lend credit to this hypothesis, is the fact that the first known appearance of a “Trevenant”, is from the close of the Pledge Dynasty.

Was it perhaps a vengeful distortional being, fed on the grief and agony of so many murdered souls, carried out the actions that those poor souls might have longed for. Death for the killers. Life for the victims.

It is sadly fitting, and though my sensibilities twinge at the violence on display, I do realize that it was entirely deserved.

Perhaps then, it is an ancient Trevenant that haunts the mountains around Laverre still, ready to bring the might of the forests down upon those who would cause it, and its denizens harm. Perhaps it even is the First, the archetypical progenitor of the species. We can never know unless the being itself chooses to communicate with us, which itself is a very unlikely possibility, given it’s recorded personality and actions through the years. Maybe there is some merit to interviewing this Fleuve Cendre fellow, if he still lives. I wasn’t able to arrange for permissions during my visit, but perhaps others will have better luck.

Didn’t the article speculate a link between Viridian’s Rockets and the Kalosian Poachers? I think I will ask Viridian’s new young leader if his city has relevant records. Something to think about for later.

For now however, none of my search has brought me any closer to an answer about what happened to you, my friend. If Agatha’s woolly nonsesne of Time Travel is true, and you came from the past...unlikely, judging by everything about you, but as my recent delvings have shown, past isnt always what present thinks it to be...then I will strive till I find you in whichever corner of history you are hiding in.
Someone like you doesn’t just disappear without leaving a footprint across the annals of time.

And if you are from the future, then I look forward to meeting you again one day.

Till then, I remain your friend,
Sammy.